1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a traffic line recognition device for recognizing traffic lines between which a vehicle runs.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional traffic line recognition device, for example, as disclosed in a patent document 1, a Hough transformation has been used at the time of finding a white line on a road. Moreover, in addition to a method of using such a Hough transformation, for example, as disclosed in a patent document 2, in order to respond to different kinds of traffic lines such as ordinary white line and traffic line made by Botts' dots, there has been proposed a traffic line recognition device using different processing methods for the respective different kinds of traffic lines.
[Patent document 1] Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 11-85999
[Patent document 1] Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2003-123058
However, among the conventional traffic line recognition devices, a traffic line recognition device using the Hough transformation needs a processing unit of high performance because of heavy processing load. Hence, the device by this method causes a problem of increasing the cost of device.
On the other hand, a traffic line recognition device employing different methods for the white line and the Botts' dots needs a large amount of resources such as memory. Hence, the device employing such methods also is not a desirable one as a device mounted on a vehicle.